Sydney Monfries ought to be graduating from university this month, one step closer to her dream of a career in journalism. Instead, the 20-year-old US woman’s bachelor degree will be awarded posthumously, delivered to her grieving family.
Monfries, a student at New York’s Fordham University, died hours after falling 12 metres in the stairwell of the campus’ clocktower at 3:20am on April 14. According to local authorities, she and a group of friends were climbing the off-limits building to take photographs of the city skyline, when she fell through an opening on one of the landings.
That same week, another US college student – Andrea Norton – slipped and fell to her death from a rocky outcrop in Arkansas’ Ozarks Mountains while taking a photograph with friends.
Later in April, two Russian teens reportedly died in similar circumstances. According to The Sun, Alyona Anopina, 14, and Polina Kavaleva, 13, were found dead within 24 hours of each other, after each “trying to take the perfect selfies”.
Headlines painted each piece of news with the same brush: ‘selfie death‘, a thoroughly modern brand of tragedy, in which someone dies in pursuit of a photo.
Selfie deaths: a modern “epidemic”?
‘Selfie death’, also referred to by some as “killfies” or even “selficide”, has become a popular narrative for news media over the past few years.
From Meenakshi Moorthy and Vishnu Viswanath, the travel bloggers who fell to their deaths in Yosemite National Park in 2018 after setting up a clifftop photoshoot, to the 26-year-old Filipino tourist who died taking a selfie at a Hong Kong waterfall this year, these types of devastating accidents make national headlines when others would barely make local ones.
Top Comments
I do not think it is truly risk taking behavior. I think the age group of these people are from a generation who hasn’t learnt to evaluate risks. For quite some time risks have been removed from our environment in particular children’s environments and it has only been very very recently that those in the early childhood sector are telling others to put risks back into their environment because they need to learn to navigate these situations while they are still young and the overall risk is not as great.
People have always fallen off things and died in stupid ways. Millennials are no less able to assess risk than any other generation or we all would have been run over by now. 200 years ago women frequently died because they walked into candles at parties while wearing flammable clothes. And I bet I can find 300 people over 60 who died doing something completely stupid in this same time period.... honestly the desire to act like people under 40 are completely incompetent in all aspects of life is so weird and ludicrous.
The culture of the 'selfie' baffles and intrigues me. Sure, there have always been foolhardy risk-takers but maybe, just maybe they feel compelled to do this. I honestly don't know.
It was the images of two injured people taking selfies in hospital after their friend had died in an accident that made me sit up and realise how over-riding it must feel (for some) to capture the moment - regardless of the context.